Executive Summary : | Water, soil and air pollution is increasing at a striking rate due to unregulated rampant increase in population, industrialization and deforestation. Due to limited availability of surface and ground water, acute scarcity of clean water in many regions of the world becomes a reality. To address this critical issue on which survival is dependent, new environment friendly technologies are required to treat waste water from various facets to reuse and reduce dependency on available ground water. Persistent organic pollutants are often difficult to remove from waste water by adsorption where the pollutants being transferred from one phase to another and later after dumping the adsorbent, enter the surface or ground water again by leaching. Photocatalysis is a green technology which selectively degrades organic pollutants and microrganisms through the excitation and creation of an electron hole pair within the photocatalyst. Titania has been used as a photocatalyst for several decades but due to high band gap of anatase titania (3.2eV), it can only be active under UV light. In the last decade black titania has gained much attention due to its ability to harness visible light. A majority of the methods are complex and often release undesirable gaseous by-products and require thermal treatment at high temperatures as well as toxic unstable precursors which restrict its use in large scale. In this context this project proposal aims to develop facile low cost fabrication methods of black titania. The key technological parameters will be optimized for controlled morphological formation of black titania to harness the solar radiation. It will be further co-doped with iron nanoparticles to impede charge recombination thereby increasing photocatalytic activity. On the application front, the fabricated black titania will be utilized to degrade two emerging organic pollutants sulfamethoxazole and diclofenac and the degradation mechanism will be examined. In addition, lignin, byproduct and many a times a waste of pulp and paper industry, bioethanol plants will be degraded to produce valuable chemicals by the fabricated black titania to shift towards sustainable circular economy by reultilizing waste material by harness solar radiation, a renewable source of energy. |